If you’re getting this, it is because you are a Ground Shots email subscriber.
I started a substack to weave into my normal emails because it is a way I can publish some deeper work where folks can pay for the publication. Certainly I will still be sending emails out on all the things I usually do. This is helpful for me for a few reasons. One, I have blogged and published works in the past, and written a lot of different kinds of work- from academic, to poetic, to travelogue, to stream of consciousness, to memory-worn and grief ridden quandaries about home and belonging and my upbringing, to philosophical pieces, surreal realism alternative universe pieces, to naturalist writing. I’ve felt a kind of writers block for awhile. Where do i even being. What writing of mine is even appropriate? Who will read it, and who cares. Who even cares? Who wants to know my inner world, except for what I perform and create for the Ground Shots audience? Why do writers even create memoir, or write from a place of feeling, do they need to get affirmation, do they feel getting it out there is for them or for others? This is in a lot of ways for me, a way to be accountable to my writing. A way to explore themes I used to explore more deeply but have left behind as I stopped my zines and felt what I had to share was too vulnerable or inappropriate, or not digestible to others. I’ve written and shared for a long time. It is always imbued with the sensitivity I have to the magic of the world around me, and also the heaviness. There is no escaping it. I approach everything with a map of emotions swirling through me that are attached to how the things, places, smells, plants, objects, and winds, dust, invoke every memory and every feeling associated with that memory at once. I’m always trying to make sense of it. Ground Shots started as an art project to make sense of it and it evolved to be about ‘research’ and ‘interviews’ of others’ work and worlds, and me acting as a vessel for weaving everyone else’s ideas together while often leaving my emotive self behind or abandoning myself, or giving so much to others, it gets taken and I’m left with broken pieces. I’ve abandoned that self, that sensitive caring little girl Kelly who loves so much. I’ve almost felt encouraged to abandon myself by some forces in my life, and at the same time, the way I can connect to and make sense of the world in the past, to connect with the people I miss far and wide who I never get to see, to do something with what I’m experiencing, the mines, the destruction, the worlds I am viewing almost as an outsider, while also getting to experiences the senses, is healing for me through writing. Writing all the different ways I’ve written before, even the ways where my words don’t even make real sentences or use words that don’t exist, is important to me. I don’t know how to begin again. So, creating substack make me feel safe. To create. I don’t want the whole world to see into my thoughts and feelings. I don’t want it to be for everyone. Subscribing to the publication will support me financially but I am really doing it to hold myself accountable and to create a safer space to express myself. What I want to share I don’t want necessarily everyone I grew up with to read (and yet I know some of you read my newsletters) or random strangers who might judge me, or people I know really well who will judge me, or use it against me anything I may want to share from my heart.
So I create this cautiously, for myself, as a way to move and release and feel like my vulnerability is truly ok. Even though, I often wake in the night out of fear when I’m too vulnerable which I get into further down below the line for paid subscribers. So if you’re a newsletter subscriber, certainly I will be sharing more here, mostly for subscribers only, and certainly will also be giving you info on new podcast episodes, classes, and when I sell herbal medicines again, but this space will be woven in.
Subscribe if you want, and I would also dare ask you, if you have judgement in your heart towards seeing more of the messiness of me, or the raw beauty and vulnerability I see, or can’t read about trauma or the complexity of land and human relational pain, or get triggered easily from reading hard things, don’t subscribe. I ask you to think carefully about whether you’re ready to know or even want to. This space is for me, and in my life, especially right now, I need to feel loved for exactly who I am. No matter how sensitive, triggered, messy, unfixable, imperfect or complicated I am. Sometimes I want to hide, sometimes I want to be seen.
This year I feel like my ego has dissolved into a pool of nothingness at moments and other times it is fragile and careful, holding on so tight. So I sent the snippet of a piece yesterday out that I didn’t necessarily intend for most people to read. Accidently. I felt awake in the middle of the night about it. I’m getting used to what it means to do this. When I did my Signal Fire artist residencies out in the wilderness, my mentors told me to be as raw and open as possible. To not be afraid. TO lay it out there. it’s easy for them to say, the consequences they don’t get to suffer.
Continue on if you please, or not, and that’s really ok with me. I just need to be me. The very few times I did spoken word reading my poetry, I felt euphoric. Maybe I’ll get to do that again with some work that I don’t usually share. Maybe not. -Kelly